


Tarnished Sunlight

by kitsuneasika



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: pokeprompts, F/M, One-Sided Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2010-08-31
Packaged: 2017-11-10 19:23:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/469793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsuneasika/pseuds/kitsuneasika
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dawn's parents divorce, she begins to spend her summers in Sunyshore. Or, alternatively, the one where Cyrus tries to convert Dawn and she's completely oblivious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tarnished Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Summer Skin challenge over at [pokeprompts](http://pokeprompts.livejournal.com/).
> 
> I do not claim any ownership over Pokemon.

She's seven years old and has never been so lonely. Dawn has never lived a day without Barry and her mother, and now all she has is a quiet father she hasn't really known in years and long stretches of empty beach. Sunyshore is beautiful, yes, with its bustling shops and white beaches, but that means nothing to a little girl of only seven years who has no one to play with and can't understand why her mother and best friend can't be with her. The small house by the beach is too far from Sunyshore for the children there to wander, and so she is all alone with the waves and the sky for company.

The days are long and hot as she walks besides the waves, her skin burning and tiny child footprints leading the way through the sand. She stops to pick up shells or splash around in the waves, and when the shadows grow long she turns around and makes her way back towards that light in the window, where she will eat a silent meal with her father. 

One day she goes a little farther than usual and comes across an abandoned building, small and breaking apart. If Barry were here, she knows, he would be already running towards it, eager to explore. He isn't there, though, and she goes inside because he can't. It takes her eyes a moment to adjust to the lack of sun, and it is then she realizes that she's not alone in there. There's someone else inside, with a grave face and large hands, and she's frightened. But Barry has also taught her to be brave, and so she speaks up and introduces herself to him.

His voice is not kind when he tells her to stay out of his way, but he doesn't specifically tell her to leave either. And anything is better than another day of walking down the beach, Wingull shrieking in the distance as she kicks at waves. So she folds herself in a corner, and quietly watches as he tinkers with some device, occasionally writing down notes in his clear, efficient handwriting. 

She comes back the next day, and the next, and the day after that, and all the weeks that follow. It takes a few weeks (and it's even longer yet before she learns his name), but he begins to talk to her. Sometimes he talks about machines and science and things she doesn't understand but listens to with wide eyes. She likes listening to him talk, because he doesn't treat her like a child, doesn't even seem to notice her age. He treats her like she should understand, and she likes that.

Sometimes, though, he doesn't talk about things like machines and science and words she can't pronounce. Sometimes, he would talk about other things, like fighting and hatred and pain.

"This world is lacking," he would say, "and that is why we all fight and cause pain."

She remembers waking up some mornings, so early that the dew was still wet on the grass, and listening to her mother crying in the room next to hers where she thought no one would hear, and thinks she can understand what he means.

He leaves shortly before summer ends. The tears gather up in her eyes, but she doesn't let them fall, because she knows he doesn't like crying and she doesn't want to do anything that he wouldn't like.

When she finally returns home a week later, Barry comes bouncing up towards her, grinning widely with stories bubbling out faster than he can form the words to tell them. When he finally asks her what she did, all the way over at Sunyshore, those days with Cyrus seem so far away. So she tells him about the beach and the waves, and keeps the memories of those days quietly locked away.

* * *

She's ten years old, and she's not in Sunyshore to face the gym leader, and it hurts. "You're too young," her mother had said. "It's too dangerous," she had said. "Wait another two years," she had begged. And so she is sent to her father again for the summer instead of training Pokémon and battling trainers and sleeping under the stars, like Barry. He had promised to wait for her, but she doesn't believe him. He's always been so impatient, so hasty, that she can't see him putting becoming a trainer on hold for anyone, not even his best friend.

The summer is quiet, as all of them have been. The days are hot, and she spends most of her days indoors, more conscious of her burning skin than she was when she was younger. But when the sun hangs low in the sky, she wanders across the sand, retracing the same steps she's been taking for the last three years. This time, though, it's an escape rather than a prison. 

One day she comes across someone standing there between sea and sky, and her steps slow as she approaches. The sun's dying light casts shadows across his face, and it's a moment before she recognizes him. It's been three years since she's last seen him, forever in a child's eyes.

She is the one to approach first once more, and it does not take long for his calculating gaze to recall her. She asks him about where he's been, and what he is doing, and his answers are blunt, direct. He is nearly as she remembers him, if not more cold then before. But to a young girl of ten, this does not matter, and it does not stop her palms from sweating or her face from flushing. Instead, she listens to what he says with wide eyes.

He tells her that he's working towards fixing the world, that he's gathering like-minded people around him. And one day, he'll rid the world of its strife and ugliness and hatred, and make it complete. 

When she leaves her heart goes thump-thump in her chest, and she thinks that she's never met someone quite like him. And that night, she silently vows that she will try to fix the world too, that she'll help make it a place free of hate and filled with love.

* * *

Two years become five, and Dawn is fifteen years old when she finally begins her journey. She understands her mother a little better now, and understands why she was so afraid to let Dawn go until now. She is no longer hurt, only eager. And Barry has waited for her too, something she never would have believed during her tenth summer, and when she asked him every year why he waited, he just ruffled her hair and fined her ten million for asking stupid questions.

But that's in the past now, and she's finally training Pokémon and facing gym leaders, just like she's dreamed since the day Barry told her he wanted to beat the Elite Four. And things would be perfect, if it weren't for the people who are spreading strife and discord throughout Sinnoh. Team Galactic, they call themselves, and it has not been so long that she has forgotten the promise she made to herself five years ago. 

Both she and Barry disrupt their schemes, battling and defeating the executives and grunts, and with each one she defeats she wonders who could do something so horrible. When she comes across the Magikarp flopping around in the empty lake, desperately trying to breathe, she chokes and gags, and decides that whoever is behind this is a fiend of the worst kind.

They sneak into the base to rescue the three spirits, and she holds off the grunts trying to hold them back while he faces the leader himself. By the time she reaches them, the leader has left and it is only Barry and the three spirits within. When she asks Barry what the leader is like, wondering what kind of person could do such horrible things, all her best friend will say is that he was crazy and wants to "get rid of emotion so the world would be a better place or something stupid like that."

And now, they make their way up Mount Coronet together, intent on defeating Team Galactic for once and for all. It is cold up there, so cold that snow falls in summer, and Dawn readjusts and tightens her scarf often to ward off against the chill sinking into her bones. They reach Spear Pillar quickly enough, and working together, it is easy for the two of them to take down the members of Team Galactic standing in-between them and their destination.

Then the leader turns towards them, and everything slows down as Dawn goes numb. He speaks, and the way he talks is the same, all cold and efficient and blunt. There are more lines on his face, but otherwise he looks the same too, and even the things he says are similar, only with slight differences that change so much. It was him that has hurt so many people; it was because of him so many Pokémon have been hurt. It is him, and nothing she can say or think will change that.

Her heart beats wildly in her chest, and with each beat she can feel it break a little more. She takes a step forward, interrupting Barry's passionate raging at him with one single word.

"Cyrus."

She knows what she has to do. She doesn't see Barry's confusion or his worry as she walks away from him, towards Cyrus. Her eyes are only for him as her hand clutches her pokeball. 

This time, she lets her tears fall as she silently says good-bye.

Her summer ends.


End file.
